At least from what I saw in North Carolina.
Here are all of the issues I saw while working on the NC Coordinated Campaign for Hillary.
(Yes, this Bernie supporter not only voted for HRC in the general election but joined her campaign staff! Not every Bernie supporter was “or Bust”.)
Megaphone - This is a mobile web site that the campaign setup to send pre-written text messages to a list of voters. A BIG problem with Megaphone in my region (NC was split into regions for campaign purposes) is that the list of people is spread out across several counties, and not counties that are close to where I was located. So without a way to filter the list by Zip Code/County/City or the ability to load my own lists into the system, Megaphone was practically useless for us where I was located.
Lack of advanced Votebuilder/VAN training - I know my way around VAN at this point from a few years of using it, but most of my coworkers didn't. Also, there were a lot of productivity tricks that I had to learn on my own that would have made my job easier if I knew about them.
Lack of local campaign support - Of course the "coordinated" campaign is anything but! We tried working with local campaigns but often they just wanted to put out yard signs or hold "meet & greet" events that only attract Democratic party officers and supporters. In other words, does anyone know how to run an effective campaign? How have we been doing this for decades yet still we have candidates for state legislative races who waste their money and do ineffective things? I could write a whole post on this alone but I'm going to stop and just say that yard signs and bumper stickers are good for Name ID and absolutely nothing else.
I'm so sick and tired of people talking about seeing more Trump signs or thinking that signs = votes. There is NO data showing any positive correlation between signs or stickers and votes. Its a big waste of money and that's why you were not seeing Hillary signs everywhere. Not because she doesn't have her fan club (trust me, she does) but that we didn't have any signs and the campaign wasn't going to spend a bunch of money on signs that instead was going to other uses.
Software / IT issues - We worked with Google Docs, which is fine and dandy except that working with actual MS Office documents caused problems when some spreadsheets wouldn't load. A minor issue involved those Hillary fonts that we were supposed to use... I never got to use them because I couldn't install them on my work laptop and even if I could the copies of Office on our machines weren't activated. Also, thanks to the lock down my documents looked mediocre because I couldn't install OpenOffice or GIMP (free Photoshop clone) or anything to help me do my job and had to do everything in Google.
Office location - This is a BIG one. Our office was located in the back of a large office building that was kind of hidden. We lost a ton of volunteers and other resources thanks to the terrible office location. Parking was difficult at times and of course the campaign didn't provide things like maps or directions sheets that would help our volunteers out. Location matters. Its worth paying a bit more for an office that is in a visible place and is easy to find.
Maps & Data - I love this one! So we had GOTV training the weekend before "GOTV launch" where we started canvassing instead of doing voter registration. We were given instructions on how to cut turf, what good and bad turf looks like, etc. Not that we needed that training because for the GOTV launch weekend all of the turf was cut by the statewide data team instead. And it was cut badly. So badly that we had people spending 5 and 6 hours "walking" 30-door packets because of how poorly they were cut. I did a packet with my fellow/intern and I had to mark a third of the homes "Inaccessible" because of how ridiculously bad the map was! In addition, the data team messed up on some of the turfs and had maps that were either zoomed out so far that you couldn't see the streets, or in one case a house from Delaware ended up on a turf so the map was completely zoomed out! Oh, and we couldn't use MiniVAN.
Principal Events - Principal is the term for an event with one of the key campaign figures. There was no notice or heads up to us about these events. We usually found out about the events a day or two before they would take place. You want to know why Hillary doesn't pull 10,000 people to a rally? Because her campaign doesn't announce the events enough days ahead so people can make plans to go!
Actually, the size of the rallies is unimportant. The campaign holds Principal events for only two reasons: to gain Earned Media / Press, and to gain volunteers. That's it.
Lack of transparency - Our call floor would change with no prior notice, and the voter registration program, oh this was great, changed from "focus on building the volunteer base more than on getting forms" to "We need to focus only on forms! [x] forms a day in region!" to "Don't focus as much on forms and recruit for canvassing instead." We weren't given a lot of information and things changed from day to day.
No breaks or time off - 7 days a week, 11-12 hours each day. Never doing that again.
Cult-like training - In fact, I think the office had a cult-like feel to it as well. There were chants and so much indoctrination especially at the training sessions that I felt like an outsider because I wasn't into the whole pep-rally atmosphere. It was very off putting.
Lack of structure - Its funny how so much of the campaign was very top-down and almost felt like a military with such a strict chain of command, yet when we had big weekends with nearly 100 people coming into our office to volunteer we were left on our own to figure out how to deal with such a flow of people, logistics, etc.
Youth and inexperience - I’m a Millennial, and I was the oldest person in the office. Older than my boss, or her boss, or his boss at the state level. Some volunteers were older, but I definitely felt like I was not part of the group especially since my coworkers were mainly college students who took a semester off and traveled across the country to work on this campaign. I think I get why this happens now, because me being one of the only "locals" meant that I always wanted to go home and see my family at night while the others had no such issue. They could be worked to death and if they wanted to leave what would happen? They'd have to go back to California or New York or other states that were far away.
Call time - So there is a hypocrisy with call time in that we were asked to make 150, 200, and then 250 calls per night. However, we were also supposed to recruit a certain number of volunteer shifts each night or week. Well the "good" calls that result in scheduling volunteers can last between 3 and 10 minutes, so either the call quality suffers as you try to rush through a bunch of low tier calls, or you don't hit the call floor. I always choose to ignore the call floor and make more meaningful calls, but I also had volunteers who helped me pick up the slack who came back because I took care of them. These people don't understand how to treat volunteers and just burn through people like crazy. No wonder a lot of activists hate these coordinated campaigns!
Conflicting priorities - During the last two weeks of voter registration, we were asked to collect hundreds of forms as a region each day, but at the same time were told to prioritize scheduling people for GOTV canvassing. Well, to register voters you need volunteers at a rate of 2 forms per voter registration "shift", or block of about 3 volunteer hours. You figure the average number of forms collected per shift is 2, and you can see how many people were needed to reach that high form goal per day (which we actually hit most days!)
Poor office planning - No furniture, no fridge, all of the office furniture was donated to the campaign. All of that Hillary campaign cash didn't go into any sort of logistics for the field team. I really felt undervalued in that office working on supposedly the most well-funded campaign in American history but sitting at Habitat for Humanity desks and chairs.
Lack of printing contingency - We had one, yes one, laser printer for our region. And yes, that one printer broke down or ran out of toner. Poor planning by the campaign meant that our boss spent some nights making Staples runs when we should have had backup plans in place for printing.
No extra laptops for data - We had people who wanted to volunteer to enter data, but no machines for them to enter data with.
Double calling - I did a pretty good job of keeping lists split up so that no one was called twice in the same day. However, some VAN issues and timing issues related to giving volunteers calls to make from home still lead to people being called multiple times. Also didn't help that we had other campaigns and all of those non-profit groups also making their own calls.
Couldn't coordinate with MoveOn or DemocracyNC, etc. - We couldn't share data with them and vice versa, which meant a lot of people were getting called multiple times and I bet people were being canvassed multiple times. This is such a waste of effort and I'm disappointed that such a "cunning" campaign like HRC's couldn't find loopholes or workarounds to campaign finance law and, say, sell its VAN data to these groups for $1 and have the groups do the same thing. This redundancy is a big problem with the DNC and I wish there was a good way for campaigns to work together on the data front so that we could all be more effective.
The organizer "turf" - I was responsible for part of a county, and only that part of the county. Other organizers had other areas. We could not do events or campaign in other organizers' "turfs". This seemed fine until I found that all of the best places to do voter registration were in downtown areas I didn’t have access to. Concerts, festivals, etc. were all out of reach for me. Instead I was stuck in a suburban area which was only slightly red. I got kicked out of nearly every shopping center and other area in my "turf" while events downtown weren't being touched due to there being too many events going on. If the campaign would have been more flexible with the turf system we would have registered more voters.
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I’m not posting any of this stuff to get a “rise” or gloat over any Hillary supporters. We’re all dealing with raw emotions right now. For me part of the healing process is getting this info out in the open while memories are still fresh so that we can regroup and improve more quickly. If we’re going to have a chance in future elections we have to take a hard look at our shortcomings and fix them or risk continuing losses to the Trumps of the world.